Venezuela’s political crisis has bled into widespread food and medical shortages for some time now, causing families to travel to neighboring countries such as Colombia in search of basic healthcare and vaccines for children.

“I worked for three and a half years as a dentist in Venezuela, and it was horrible dealing with the statistics,” said Rodríguez, who defected from the program late last year and is in Colombia awaiting a U.S. visa. “I might see five patients a day, but I had to say I’d seen 18, and then throw all that medicine away, because we simply had to.”

Trashing medicine in a country where it’s desperately needed was painful, doctors said. But if they were caught giving it away — or even worse, selling it — they would be kicked out of the mission and sent back to Cuba. And regular audits of their supplies meant they needed them to match their patient count.

There’s a lot of money involved (emphasis added),

“You have to understand that Venezuela pays Cuba based on statistics, not based on what’s really happening in the clinics,” he explained.
. . .
Dentists are particularly under the gun because Venezuela pays for their services in cash, as opposed to crude, workers said.